Thursday, April 16, 2009

Jezebel's got the first chapter of Why He Didn't Call you back and while I can't read it all now, I'm pretty disgusted with the first few pages. We'll see if I ever make it through the book.The part where I know this isn't my brand of dating advice?

Here's a little multiple choice quiz: what's the goal of a first date?A) To allow a man to discover the real you, orB) To get him to want a second date with you?

(The author goes on to sagaciously point out that B is the correct answer.)

How about neither? How about "To decide if YOU are interested in a second date?" Why does everything have to be about him, anyway? The reason he didn't want a second date isn't because you exposed your "true self" which was, obviously, awful and despicable to him so he left you forever and now you're meaningless. He didn't call back because you acted like a lunatic who puts everyone's needs before your own.

Seriously. Who cares? I get it though, if I were to meet a guy at my age who has had 19 sexual partners my first thought would be, "How?" After that it would occur to me that he has probably gone through sexual partners quickly.

I understand that a person's dating history is important. Like, if my current boyfriend's girlfriends all dumped him because he started telling them what clothes they could and couldn't wear it would concern me. So if a guy tells me he's been getting down with a new girl every couple months for the last few years, I might not take him seriously if he tries to come onto me, I might expect things to last about as long as his last 19 sexual encounters. Is this wrong? I think not, but only to the extent that we recognize the pattern rather than judge it and naturally, Mr. Every 2 Months might actually want to try a long-term relationship and I don't think he should be excluded from that possibility based solely on the fact that he spent a few years sleeping around.

This all makes me wonder, is the number relevant? Should we be asking our sexual partners to not only keep count, but report it? If Mr. 19 wants to to have a serious relationship with Ms. 3, can't she figure that out with out him explicitly saying so?

We all know double standards are shit. Any man or woman who thinks it's inappropriate for his girlfriend to have too many (what does that even mean?) previous partners is buying into the idea that women- or people- are worth more or less depending on how readily they'll unzip their pants and that's bullshit. Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism says we should reclaim our numbers and let our partners know the score. I'm not sure I agree, though.I prefer not to know. I prefer not to talk about it in terms of numbers, I just want to know if they were safe and if he's recently been tested. I don't like guys to ask for my number, either. It's not about being embarrassed that there are too many or too few, I don't think that's possible. I just don't know what it does for them, for our relationship, and for me. Maybe I'm just giving ground to the patriarchy, but what's done is done and to me, it's not really anyone's business. All my boyfriend needs to know is if I did it safely-- not how many times.

Monday, April 13, 2009

I like to think the majority of Americans are not ignorant. However, the exchange students were shocked to see how oblivious some are to countries outside of the U.S. So I'm going to quickly clear up some misconceptions.

The Capital of Spain is not Espana, Espana is Spanish for Spain. The capital is Madrid.

In Switzerland they do not speak Swiss. They Speak French and German.

Hong Kong is not communist. In fact it is the most capitalistic country in the world. China supposedly granted Hong Kong autonomy for fifty years, but has recently been working to change Hong Kong culture towards the modern "Chinese" culture that is more in line with 1st world countries.

Hong Kong is Chinese, not Japanese. They do not speak Japanese there.

Hong Kong speaks Cantonese. There are two types of Chinese-- Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin is the Chinese National language. Most business in HK is conducted in English.

Japanese and Chinese do not sound alike. The languages are totally different. Japanese barrows certain characters from Chinese, but also adds their own.

Ninjas, Sumos, Sushi, and Samuri are Japanese not Chinese.

Tibet is a part of China, but only recently. The "Save Tibet" stickers are there because China took over Tibet and is accused of destroying the national identity and culture, so if someone tells you they are Tibetan replying "Oh! I love Chinese stuff!" sounds really ignorant and offensive.

Some of these things are more basic than others, I don't expect that people will understand that Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin are so different or even be aware of Cantonese. However, people really shouldn't call an HK guy a communist when he comes from the most capitalistic country in the world. So hopefully this helps.

So I haven't been doing much hard-core feminizing since I'm on vacation and all, but I thought I'd share some fun things.Since my travel partners are all exchange students from Asia these are a few things they taught me.

According to my friend from Hong Kong, women there experience equality in the work force and may even experience higher pay and rates of employment. I couldn't believe it, but I want to. While I had trouble finding stats, here's a link to an article that may back up his claim. It looks like Singapore and mainland China have some pretty independent women, too. It makes me want to question the labeling of countries as 1st vs. 3rd world, apparently the US is a leader, just not for women, instead the countries lagging behind are leading in financial equity between the genders. What's with that?

It's popular in Korea for women to have their eyebrows tattooed in. My traveling mate has the tattoo, I thought it was make up before she explained about it.

In Japan it is rare for friendships to develop between people born in different years due to the way the language is structured. Because there is special structure for the language between people who are even a year apart, they cannot speak to people one year their senior as they would their friends.

I also got a chance to visit the history museum in downtown Miami. It was great, I learned that Haitians do not receive the same immigration rights as Cubans and the U.S. sends them back to Haiti if they are discovered. I got to see a Haitian boat and a Cuban raft that were used to travel to the U.S. It was really amazing.

This city is beautiful, especially the South Beach area.

Oh and one more foreign fact: the Korean word for "boogers" sounds just like the Japanese for "children."

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

I went to the movies with 3 of my friends and the one in ROTC decides to buy us all tickets. His treat. We are at the dollar theater, by the way. (Do I go to any other?) But I'm a determined little feminist and I'd lost a bet on these tickets that I fully intended to pay off when ROTC says this, "No, it's fine, really. You're paying for him degrades him as a man."Oh the things people say. Just to be clear, my friend won his movie ticket in a game of horse. Isn't it super manly to win stuff and compete and junk?ROTC took my freaking money in the end and will probably think twice before he says being paid for is degrading again.

The movie we saw was Bride Wars, which had a few good jokes and was otherwise a bunch of tired, sexist stereotypes: a wedding is the most important thing in a woman's life, men don't care about weddings because they aren't that important for men (since they don't need women as much as women need them), the list goes on into infinity because this was a long episode of Bridezillas. Seriously. I didn't dream about my stupid wedding, but apparently every other woman on the face of this planet did. Basically, we're insignificant, lonely people who are incomplete until we become brides. Of course, becoming a bride brings out our true colors and we start fighting and go crazy.Zero Stars for Bride Wars.

Today I leave for Miami. I can't wait. Sun, gators, the weather is finally not snowing here in Utah (until next week), so this is exciting.